Anatas, which had been recruited for the project primarily in its capacity as a Dell Boomi partner, started working on the project in early April last year with the knowledge that Linx’s go-live date was in the middle of August.
According to Douglas, Linx had already selected all of its key software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications already, each of which had its own respective delivery partner.
This meant that there were five or six streams of parallel activity all taking place at once during the project, with respective project teams running on their own timeframe, reporting into a central Linx-run and managed project management office.
When Anatas was plugged into the project, the company was tasked with owning the infrastructure deployment, combining its activity with Dell Boomi, the client itself and Linx’s other infrastructure partner, which was doing a lot of the Microsoft Azure work and related jobs.
“We were responsible for all of the integrations and the interfaces and making sure that we hit our deadlines,” Douglas said. “We were adaptive to the project streams.
“The tail doesn’t often get to wag the dog, so we were sort of the glue that was joining them all together. We had to be adaptive to those other elements,” he said.
Ultimately, Anatas’ main outcomes in the project involved the integrations and interfaces, built in Dell Boomi’s plaform, which enabled connectivity between the other five or six key mission-critical business systems and business applications being woven together.
These included the payroll system, the finance system, the time-keeping system and other systems, with Anatas building the connectivity and the integrations between those different systems, with all the players working on the project used agile principles to deliver results.
In the end Linx was able to connect its core operational systems, located in Azure, and its data centres with in-field mobile devices and in-vehicle telemetry systems.
In fact, the aggregated data made possible by the project has inspired an upcoming data lake project, through which Linx plans to deploy analytics for more informed business decisions.
This is expected to be particularly beneficial as the uptake of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoT) gains an increasingly-prominent role across the organisation’s four brands, Linx, Autocare, C3 and GeelongPort.
